Description:

Signed by Author 1416591796 This hardcover book is Fine, being square and tight. The boards and spine have no wear with pristine lettering. The pages and endpages are clean, with no markings or folds. The dustjacket is As New. Original Price is intact. Not ex-lib. No remainder mark. Bookseller Inventory # 006683

About this title:

Synopsis: PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, READING MY FATHER IS THE STORY OF A DAUGHTER COMING TO KNOW HER FATHER AT LAST? A GIANT AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND A MAN WHOSE DEVASTATING DEPRESSION DARKENED THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE.

In Reading My Father, William Styron?s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron?s parents?the Pulitzer Prize?winning author of Sophie?s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose?were, for half a century, leading players on the world?s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father?s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind.

A drinker, a carouser, and above all ?a high priest at the altar of fiction,? Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family?s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem.

From Styron?s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist?s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation?s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.

About the Author&colon;ALEXANDRA STYRON is the author of the novel All the Finest Girls and a graduate of Barnard College and the MFA program at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications, and she has taught memoir writing in the MFA program at Hunter College. She lives with her husband and two children in Brooklyn, NY.